- HBO Max intends to aggressively crack down on password sharing. The streaming service, which has given users the option to pay an additional $8 per month to share passwords outside the home will begin to make that fee mandatory starting in September.
The watch party is over for people who have been freeloading on their subscription to HBO Max.
Warner Bros. Discovery says it will begin to more aggressively clamp down on people who share passwords on a recent earnings call. People who insist on adding viewers outside of their household will be asked to pay an additional $7.99 per month.
That fee has actually been in place for a while, but the restrictions haven’t been strongly enforced. That ends at the end of August, said WBD streaming chief JB Perrette.
The company, Perrette said, has been testing for months to determine “who’s a legitimate user, who may not be a legitimate user.” With that determined, he said, “we are putting the net in the right place, so to speak.”
Warner Bros. Discovery has been threatening a crackdown on password sharing for over a year. The enforcement will follow Netflix’s decision to put an end to password sharing in 2023 and a similar action in February 2024 by Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+. Disney CEO Bob Iger said the issue was “a real priority” on an earnings call with analysts in 2023.
Password sharing has become a problem for all streaming services and could cost the industry up to $25 billion a year, according to a Citibank report. Netflix said in 2022 that more than 100 million households are using accounts paid for by other people.
Crackdowns drive subscriptions, though. Netflix saw a big surge in sign-ups after it prohibited the sharing of user passwords. Subscriber growth in the quarter following the action saw 5.9 million new users, nearly three times what analysts had estimated.
